Crafting a useful and compelling textbook from the diverse, contested, and ever-mutating material and methodologies of any scholarly field constitutes no small task. The authors of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity are to be congratulated for the boldness and originality with which they approached such an endeavor, and their survey of the art and visual culture of the geographic region now known as the United States does indeed constitute, as the back-cover copy states, a “tremendous accomplishment.” The text presents a persuasive and rich portrait of the history of the arts in America on two levels. First, it narrates this history as it has come to be understood in recent years by the majority of scholars in the field, i.e., one not wholly bound by chronological or geographic borders. In American Encounters, the history of American art begins well before conquest and colonization (and this portion of the text is substantive, much more than a token acknowledgment of pre-conquest cultures and civilizations), and it extends beyond the confines of the Eastern Seaboard to attend (again, substantively) to multiple regions, including those that constitute the origin points of various sorts of diasporas (Africa and Mexico, for instance). Second, it...